Administration Guide
Production State is an important concept in Zenoss. It determines whether or not a device is monitored and can be used to control several elements of the event system such as whether or not an event will produce a remote alert (email or page). Typically devices start off their life in state “Pre-Production.” In this state, devices are monitored by default but no remote alerting occurs and events are not shown on the Dashboard. Once a device is in full “Production” state monitoring is occurring and remote alerts are sent. If service needs to be performed on a device its state can be set to “Maintenance” to temporarily block any remote alerts.
There are three factors that determine how to choose a Production State for a device:
1. Whether or not the device is being monitored.
2. Whether or not you want alerting to occur.
3. Whether or not the device appears on the dashboard.
Available production states are:
Production - you want all three: monitoring, alerting and dashboard.
Pre-Production - you may want monitoring but not alerting or the appearance of the device notices on the dashboard
Test - you may want monitoring and alerting (sent to one email) and but not displaying device info on the dashboard.
Maintenance - you want monitoring and collection to occur, and maybe or maybe not the device on the dashboard, just not alerting occurring
Decommissioned - no monitoring, no dashboard, no alerting
You can set the Production State for a device or group of devices by going to the Edit Tab for the device or device group and changing the Production State drop-down to whatever state you want the new Production State to be. The default Production state when you add a device is Production. If you change the Production State for a hierarchy of devices, the Production state propagates down the hierarchy except when you define an exception to the Production State further down the hierarchy.